Alexandria City High School’s very own newspaper Theogony has been actively working throughout the years to spread the issues, accomplishments and inner workings of our school environment. However, Theogony’s articles often take a long time to come out and can be subject to errors due to the inherently flawed human nature. After a classroom vote, Theogony’s staff has decided 22-4 that as of the 2026-27 school year, all Theogony staff will officially be replaced by ChatGPT.
This decision has been a long time coming. Large language models such as ChatGPT have seen major improvements over the past several years, with ChatGPT being tested many times by current Theogony staff to ensure it can retain journalistic integrity.
When ChatGPT was asked how it feels about this decision, it said, “I’d say your newspaper just made a very efficient decision, but maybe not the best one.” It was then asked to re-answer the question but agree with the decision, with it saying, “I’d say it’s a confident step into the future of student media–and I’m ready to take on the role.”
Certain students within Theogony’s staff have gripes with the decision however. Junior and staff writer Gregory Greglestein said that the replacement of Theogony staff with AI completely undermines the efforts and respect of student journalists worldwide. He was promptly replaced by a more conforming student.
Along with this, ACHS administrators also disagree with the decision. In a 14 page document released by administration, they outlined their issues with Theogony’s switch to AI. “The use of any AI creation tools in our school is despicable, and will not be tolerated in any capacity.” Says an excerpt from the document. This same 14 page document was entered into an AI detector by Theogony staff, and it was discovered that there is a 97% chance that it was generated by AI. The administration declined to answer any questions about the situation.
This is a huge switch for Theogony, and it may cause confusion or fear for members of our community. To quell these fears, Theogony interviewed LLM developer and expert Nota Robut about the benefits and potential dangers of having a fully AI run newspaper, with her saying, “AI is well known for always providing factually correct and unbiased information, with LLM’s such as ChatGPT having strict guardrails in place to prevent misuse. As long as said misuse is not related to the Department of Defense and its military contract with OpenAI.”
We at Theogony hope to make this transition as smooth as possible. As we enter a new age of student journalism, we will ensure that ChatGPT will be efficient while keeping the needs of our students in mind. And if we are lucky, by the end of next year we may be able to release 30 more articles about Minga.
